Constraints and preferences

The scheduling rules consist of a series of constraints and preferences. Most of the rules are very easily understood, but a few of them require some additional explanations.

Constraints are rules that are always honored unless two constraints are in direct conflict with each other. For example, in a situation where one constraint requires you to schedule fixed shift employees and another constraint requires you to not exceed budget, the system may not be able to schedule the fixed shift employees if there is insufficient budget allocated.

Preferences are much more flexible. The nature of a preference means that the optimizer may break the rule to produce a better schedule. Preferences may be weighted, but this weighting is only used in the case of a tiebreaker to determine which preference will be honored. Otherwise, this weighting does not have a great deal of influence over the schedule results.

See Staffing rules for a list of constraints and preferences and the parameters that you can select for each.